Or that 99% of human beings all have different maxima so that their superposition is not the maximum of any one of them, but there is no single state that a supermajority prefers to CEV?
Yes. I expect CEV, if it works as advertised, to lead to a state that almost all humans (as they are today, with no major cognitive changes) would see as an acceptable compromise, an improvement over things today, but far worse than their personal desires implemented at the expense of the rest of humankind.
Therefore, while working on CEV of humanity might be a good compromise and cooperation, I expect any group working on it to prefer to implement that group's CEV, instead.
You say that you (and all people on this project) really prefer to take the CEV of all humanity. Please explain to me why - I honestly don't understand. How did you end up with a rare preference among humans, that says "satisfy all humans even though their desires might be hateful to me"?
"but far worse than their personal desires implemented at the expense of the rest of humankind."
uh....i thought this was sort of the point. also, given holodecks (or experience machines of any sort), I disagree.
EDIT: never mind, conversational context mismatch.
Taken from some old comments of mine that never did get a satisfactory answer.
1) One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results. This seems to assume that change in human values over time is mostly "progress" rather than drift. Do we have any evidence for that, except saying that our modern values are "good" according to themselves, so whatever historical process led to them must have been "progress"?
2) How can anyone sincerely want to build an AI that fulfills anything except their own current, personal volition? If Eliezer wants the the AI to look at humanity and infer its best wishes for the future, why can't he task it with looking at himself and inferring his best idea to fulfill humanity's wishes? Why must this particular thing be spelled out in a document like CEV and not left to the mysterious magic of "intelligence", and what other such things are there?