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PhilGoetz comments on Homogeneity vs. heterogeneity (or, What kind of sex is most moral?) - Less Wrong
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High diversity = exploration Low diversity, many copies of previously-successful organisms or memes or thought processes = exploitation
Low diversity => high cooperation High diversity => feelings and morals that emphasize individuality
Given a goal and an environment, there is some optimal balance between exploration and exploitation. But that balance also strongly influences the resulting balance between collectivist and individualist ethics.
How does (intra-human) cultural variation in individualism/collectivism feed into this?
Those are finer-grained variations, and aren't explained by sexual diploidy, since all humans are sexually diploid.
To the extent that such finer-grained variation is possible, it suggests that the constraint you're positing isn't actually that much of a constraint.
Maybe I'm still missing the point of the post.
Are you assuming that evolutionary experiments have to be embodied in individual agents? If so, it seems like an incorrect assumption to me. An ecosystem can explore a search space and generate innovative solutions - even if each generation of individuals consists entirely of identical clones.
Killing sentient organisms in order to explore a search space seems wasteful, unnecessary and barbaric.
I am assuming that the agents of the ethical system are self-interested, and that requires them to have identities. This assumption isn't necessarily true, but it covers a large enough space of possible worlds to be worth considering. It's also a part of the space that is easier for us to understand than its complement.
Not sure where the "killing sentient organisms" comes in. That also introduces a set of assumptions. When, at work, I send 500,000,000,000 BLAST jobs out to the computing grid, to run on 700 computers comprising 2800 CPUs, with 5,000 different outer-loop starting points, how many organisms am I killing when I end the run?
I am not sure you got my point. I'll try again. To efficiently search a space, you need some variation in the trials that are performed. However, that variation does not necessarily need to be embodied in the genomes of intelligent agents. It could be in the form of variations in lab experiments performed. Progress today does not depend on genetic variation between humans. It depends on memetic variation - and the memes are usually not embodied as agents that are conscious or do much cooperating. As far as I can tell, if you understand this, your original questions seem to fall apart.