Okay, I've read through the whole thing so far.

This is not rationalist fiction. This is standard war porn, paperback thriller stuff. Many many technical descriptions of guns, rockets, military vehicles, etc. Throughout the story there's never any real conflict, just the American military (with help from the rest of the world) steamrolling everything, and the denizens of Heaven and Hell admiring the American way of life. It was well-written enough to hold my attention like a can of Pringles would, but I don't feel enriched by reading it.

keyword = "werther effect"

What do you mean practical ways? I understand the difficulty of transferring kinesthetic or social understanding, but how can we overcome that in nonverbalized fashion?

Some things have to be shown, you have to sometimes take part in an activity to "get" it, learn by trial and error, get feedback pointing out mistakes that you are unaware of, etc...

What are you doing?

Are our answers confined to 140 characters or less?

I don't make arguments for terminal values. I assert them.

Arguments that make any (epistemic) sense in this instance would be references to evidence to something that represents the value system (eg. neurological, behavioural or introspective observations about the relevant brain).

That's not an argument for information as a terminal value since it depends on the consequences of information, but it's a decent argument for gathering and preserving information.

I very much doubt that we have enough understanding of human values / preferences / utility functions to say that anything makes the list, in any capacity, without exception.

In this case, I think that information is useful as an instrumental value, but not as a terminal value in and of itself. It may lie on the path to terminal values in enough instances (the vast majority), and be such a major part of realizing those values, that a resource-constrained reasoning agent might treat it like a terminal value, just to save effort.

I look at it like a genie bottle: nearly anything you want could be satisfied with it, or would be made much easier with its use, but the genie isn't what you really want.

One thing you may want to address is what you mean by "gather and preserve information." The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that's useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.

Do you mean that information already is a terminal value for (most) humans? Arguing that something should be a terminal value makes only a limited amount of sense, terminal values usually don't need reasons, though they have (evolutionary, cultural etc.) causes.

Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for

1. Information is a terminal value without exception.
2. All information is inherently good.
3. We must gather and preserve information for its own sake.

These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don't.

Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information ("guns don't kill people"). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.

Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.