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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Malthusian copying: mass death of unhappy life-loving uploads - Less Wrong Discussion
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Stuart, it sounds like you think that the life of the typical animal, and of the typical human in history, were not worth living -- you'd prefer that they had never existed. Since you seem to think your own life worth living, you must see people like you as a rare exception, and may be unsure if your existence justifies all the suffering your ancestors went through to produce you. And you'd naturally be wary of a future of descendants with lives more like your ancestors' than like your own. What you'd most want from the future is to stop change enough to ensure that people very much like you continue to dominate.
If we conceive of "death" broadly, then pretty much any competitive scenario will have lots of "death", if we look at it on a large enough scale. But this hardly implies that individuals will often feel the emotional terror of an impending death - that depends far more on framing and psychology.
I'd prefer that their lives were better, rather than there were more of them.
What I'd most want from the future is change in many directions (more excitement! more freedom! more fun!), but not in the direction of low-individual-choice, death-filled worlds (with possibly a lot of pain). I'd eagerly embrace a world without mathematicians, without males, without academics, without white people (and so on down the list of practically any of my characteristics), without me or any copy of me, in order to avoid the malthusian scenario.
Even if you and I might disagree on trading number/length of lives for some measure of quality, I hope you see that my analysis can help you identify policies that might push the future in your favored direction. I'm first and foremost trying to predict the outcomes of a low regulation scenario. That is the standard basis for analyzing the consequences of possible regulations.
Hang on, yesterday you were telling me that there's very little anyone could do to make a real difference to the outcome. So why tell Stuart that your analysis could be helpful in bringing about a different outcome?
The issue is the size of the influence you can have. Even if you only have a small influence, you still want to think about how to use it.
Certainly. I don't dispute the utility of the research (though I do sometimes feel that it is presented in ways that make the default outcome seem more attractive).