These are very good points I wouldn't have thought about.
I guess my preferences for 10% of people having an opinion X (where 90% have opinion non-X) over a hive mind which 10% believes and 90% disbelieves in X has two sources:
1) Overconfidence about the ability of those 10% of people to somehow outsmart the remaining 90%. For example, if we speak about rationality, I hope the rationalists are able to win.
2) An intuition that if you mix food with crap, the result is not half-food-half-crap but crap. Again, specifically for rationality, having a few rational and many insane people might be better than having everyone mostly insane, or even waist-deep in the valley of bad rationality.
But both of these objections are pretty dubious.
In other words, I believe that rationality (or any other value) can somehow benefit from being separated, from having a local power as opposed to being a tiny minority in a large place.
if you mix food with crap, the result is not half-food-half-crap but crap.
To the extent that this is true, then it follows that there are no rational humans, nor even half-rational humans, but simply irrational humans. After all, every human mind is a mixture of rational and irrational elements.
I asked this question on IRC before and got some surprising answers.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you get cryo-preserved and eventually wake up as an upload. Maybe meat->sim transfer ends up being much easier than sim->meat or meat->meat, or something. Further suppose that you are not particularly averse to a digital-only existence, at least not enough to specifically prohibit reviving you if this is the only option. Yet further suppose that sim-you is identical to meat-you for all purposes that meat-you cared about (including all your hidden desires and character faults). Let's also preemptively assume that any other attempts to fight this hypothetical have been satisfactorily resolved, just to get this out of the way.
Now, in the "real world", or at least in the simulation level we are at, there is no evidence that telepathy of any kind exists or is even possible. However, in the sim-world there is no technological reason it cannot be implemented in some way, for just thoughts, or just feelings, or both. There is a lot to be said for having this kind of connection between people (or sims). It gets rid of or marginalizes deception, status games, mis-communication-based biases and fallacies. On the other hand, your privacy disappears completely and so do any advantages over others the meat-you might want to retain in the digital world. And what you perceive as your faults are out there for everyone to see and feel.
As a new upload, you are informed that many "people" decided to get integrated into the telepathic society and appear to be happy about it, with few, if any, defections. There is also the group of those who opted out, and it looks basically like your "normal" mundane human society. There is only a limited and strictly monitored interaction between the two worlds to prevent exploitation/manipulation.
Would you choose to get fully integrated or stay as human-like as possible? Feel free to suggest any other alternative (suicide, start a partially integrated society, etc.).
P.S. This topic has been rather extensively covered in science fiction, but I could not find a quality online discussion anywhere.