What's wrong with embracing foreign cultures, uploadings, upliftings, and so on?
Maybe I am biased by my personal history, having embraced what, as far as I can tell, is the very cutting edge of Western Culture (i.e. the less-wrong brand of secular humanism), and feeling rather impatient for my origin cultures to follow a similar path, which they are violently reticent to. Maybe I've got a huge blind spot of some other sort.
But when the Superhappies demand that we let them eradicate suffering forever, or when CelestAI offers us all our own personal paradise on the only condition that it be pony-flavoured, I don't just feel like I want to enthusiastically jump in, abandoning all caution. I feel like it's a moral imperative to take them up on their offer, and that getting in their way is a crime that is potentially on the same level as genocide or mass torture.
Yet in both stories these examples come from, and in the commentary by the authors, this is qualified as a Bad Thing... but I don't recall coming across an explanation that would satisfy me as to why.
Again, please warn me if I'm mixing things up here, as my purpose here is to correct any flaws that my stance may have, by consulting with minds that I expect will understand the problem better than I, and might see the flaws in how I frame it.
The thing about the Superhappies is that, well, people want to be able to be sad in certain situations. It's like Huxley's Brave New World - people are "happier" in that society, but they've sacrificed something fundamental to being human in the course of achieving that happiness. (Personally, I think that "not waiting the eight hours it would take to evacuate the system" isn't the right decision - the gap between the "compromise" position the Superhappies are offering and humans' actual values, when combined with the very rea...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.