I think I expect Earth in this case to just say no and not sell the sun? But I was confused at like 2 points in your paragraph so I don't think I understand what you're saying that well. I also think we're probably on mostly the same page, and am not that interested in hashing out further potential disagreements.

Also, mostly unrelated, maybe a hot take, but if you're able to get outcompeted because you don't upload, then the future you're in is not very good.

Cool. I misinterpreted your previous comment and think we're basically on the same page.

I think the majority of humans probably won't want to be uploads, leave the solar system permanently, etc. Maybe this is where we disagree? I don't really think there's going to be a thing that most people care about more.

I don't think that's a very good analogy, but I will say that is is basically true for the Amish. And I do think that we should respect their preferences. (I seperately think cars are not that good, and that people would infact prefer to bicycle around or ride house drawn carriges or whatever if civilization was conducive to that, although that's kinda besides the point.)

I'm not arguing that we should be conservative about changing the sun. I'm just claiming that people like the sun and won't want to see it eaten/fundamentally transformed, and that we should respect this preference. This is reason why it's different from candles -> lightbulbs, because people very obviously wanted lightbulbs when offered. But I don't think the marginal increase in well-being from eating the sun will be nearly enough to make balance against the desire that the sun remain the same, so I don't think most people will on net want the sun to be eaten. To be clear, this is an empirical claim about what people want that might very well be false.

I am claiming that people when informed will want the sun to continuing being the sun. I also think that most people when informed will not really care that much about creating new people, will continue to believe in the act-omission distinction, etc. And that this is a coherent view that will add up to a large set of people wanting things in the solar system to remain conservatively the same. I seperately claim that if this is true, then other people should just respect this preference, and use the other stars that people don't care about for energy.

But most people on Earth don't want "an artificial system to light the Earth in such a way as to mimic the sun", they want the actual sun to go on existing.

This is in part the reasoning used by Judge Kaplan:

Kaplan himself said on Thursday that he decided on his sentence in part to make sure that Bankman-Fried cannot harm other people going forward. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future,” he said. “In part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him, to the extent that can appropriately be done, for a significant period of time.”

from https://time.com/6961068/sam-bankman-fried-prison-sentence/

It's kind of strange that, from my perspective, these mistakes are very similar to the mistakes I think I made, and also see a lot of other people making. Perhaps one "must" spend too long doing abstract slippery stuff to really understand the nature of why it doesn't really work that well?

I know what the word means, I just think in typical cases people should be saying a lot more about why something is undignified, because I don’t think people’s senses of dignity typically overlap that much, especially if the reader doesn’t typically read LW. In these cases I think permitting the use of the word “undignified” prevents specificity.

"Undignified" is really vague

I sometimes see/hear people say that "X would be a really undignified". I mostly don't really know what this means? I think it means "if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed." It's not really an argument against X. It's not dissimilar to saying "vibes are off with X".

Not saying you should never say it, but basically every use I see could/should be replaced with something more specific.