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Mitchell_Porter comments on The Design Space of Minds-In-General - Less Wrong
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Seriously? For my part, I doubt that a typical human wants to do that much work. I suspect that "favored and privileged subject of a benevolent dictator" would be much more popular. Even more popular would be "favored and privileged beneficiary of a benevolent system without a superior peer."
But agreed that none of this implies a reduced interest in having one's desires satisfied.
(ETA: And, I should note, I agree with your main point about nonuniversality of drives.)
Immediately after I posted that, I doubted it. A lot of people might just want autonomy - freedom from dependency on others and freedom from the control of others. Dictator of yourself, but not dictator of humanity as a whole. Though one should not underestimate the extent to which human desire is about other people.
Will Newsome is talking about - or I thought he was talking about - value systems that would be stable in a situation where human beings have superintelligence working on their side. That's a scenario where domination should become easy and without costs, so if people with a desire to rule had that level of power, the only thing to stop them from reshaping everyone else would be their own scruples about doing so; and even if they were troubled in that way, what's to stop them from first reshaping themselves so as to be guiltless rulers of the world?
Also, even if we suppose that that outcome, while stable, is not what anyone would really want, if they first spent half an eternity in self-optimization limbo investigating the structure of their personal utility function... I remain skeptical that "Buddhahood" is the universal true attractor, though it's hard to tell without knowing exactly what connotations Will would like to convey through his use of the term.
I am skeptical about universal attractors in general, including but not limited to Buddhahood and domination. (Psychological ones, anyway. I suppose entropy is a universal attractor in some trivial sense.) I'm also inclined to doubt that anything is a stable choice, either in the sense you describe here, or in the sense of not palling after a time of experiencing it.
Of course, if human desires are editable, then anything can be a stable choice: just modify the person's desires such that they never want anything else. By the same token, anything can be a universal attractor: just modify everyone's desires so they choose it. These seem like uninteresting boundary cases.
I agree that some humans would, given the option, choose domination. I suspect that's <1% of the population given a range of options, though rather more if the choice is "dominate or be dominated." (Although I suspect most people would choose to try it out for a while, if that were an option, then would give it up in less than a year.)
I suspect about the same percentage would choose to be dominated as a long-term lifestyle choice, given the expectation that they can quit whenever they want.
I agree that some would choose autonomy, though again I suspect not that many (<5%, say) would choose it for any length of time.
I suspect the majority of humans would choose some form of interdependency, if that were an option.
Entropy is the lack of an identifiable attractor.