Analogously: “I am claiming that people when informed will want horses to continue being the primary mode of transportation. I also think that most people when informed will not really care that much about economic growth, will continue to believe that you’re more responsible for changing things than for maintaining the status quo, etc. And that this is a coherent view that will add up to a large set of people wanting things in cities to remain conservatively the same. I separately claim that if this is true, then other people should just respect this preference, and go find new continents / planets on which to build cars that people in the cities don’t care about.”
Sometimes it’s good to be conservative when you’re changing things, like if you’re changing lots of social norms or social institutions, but I don’t get it at all in this case. The sun is not a complicated social institution, it’s primarily a source of heat and light and much of what we need can be easily replicated especially when you have nanobots. I am much more likely to grant that we should be slow to change things like democracy and the legal system than I am that we should change exactly how and where we should get heat and light. Would you have wanted conservatism around moving from candles to lightbulbs? Installing heaters and cookers in the house instead of fire pits? I don’t think so.
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 not sure what point you are making with “respect their preferences”, I am not proposing one country go to war with other countries to take the sun. For instance, one way it might go down is someone will just offer to buy it from Earth, and the price will be many orders of magnitude more resources than Earth has, so Earth will accept, and replace it with an artificial source of light & heat.
I may be wrong about the estimates of the value of the energy, neither of us have specified how the rest of the stars in the universe will get distributed. For concreteness, I am here imagining something like: the universe is not a whole singleton but made of many separate enclaves that have their own governance and engage in trade with one another, and that Earth is a special one that keeps a lot of its lineage with present-day Earth, and is generally outcompeted by all the others ones that are smarter/faster and primarily run by computational-minds rather than biological ones.
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.
Analogously: “I am claiming that people when informed will want horses to continue being the primary mode of transportation. I also think that most people when informed will not really care that much about economic growth, will continue to believe that you’re more responsible for changing things than for maintaining the status quo, etc. And that this is a coherent view that will add up to a large set of people wanting things in cities to remain conservatively the same. I separately claim that if this is true, then other people should just respect this preference, and go find new continents / planets on which to build cars that people in the cities don’t care about.”
Sometimes it’s good to be conservative when you’re changing things, like if you’re changing lots of social norms or social institutions, but I don’t get it at all in this case. The sun is not a complicated social institution, it’s primarily a source of heat and light and much of what we need can be easily replicated especially when you have nanobots. I am much more likely to grant that we should be slow to change things like democracy and the legal system than I am that we should change exactly how and where we should get heat and light. Would you have wanted conservatism around moving from candles to lightbulbs? Installing heaters and cookers in the house instead of fire pits? I don’t think so.
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 not sure what point you are making with “respect their preferences”, I am not proposing one country go to war with other countries to take the sun. For instance, one way it might go down is someone will just offer to buy it from Earth, and the price will be many orders of magnitude more resources than Earth has, so Earth will accept, and replace it with an artificial source of light & heat.
I may be wrong about the estimates of the value of the energy, neither of us have specified how the rest of the stars in the universe will get distributed. For concreteness, I am here imagining something like: the universe is not a whole singleton but made of many separate enclaves that have their own governance and engage in trade with one another, and that Earth is a special one that keeps a lot of its lineage with present-day Earth, and is generally outcompeted by all the others ones that are smarter/faster and primarily run by computational-minds rather than biological ones.
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.