Animal breeding would be a better analogy, and seems to suggest a different and much more tentative conclusion. For example, if humans were being actively bred for corrigibility and friendliness, it looks to me like like they would quite likely be corrigible and friendly up through the current distribution of human behavior.
I was just thinking about this. The central example that’s often used here is “evolution optimized humans for inclusive genetic fitness, nonetheless humans do not try to actually maximize the amount of their surviving offspring, such as by everyone wanting to donate to sperm/egg banks”.
But evolution does not seem to maximize fitness in that sense, where the fitness of a species would be a distinct thing-in-the-world that could be directly observed and optimized for. Something like “docileness” or “size”, as used in animal breeding, would be a much better analogy, since those things are something that you can directly observe and optimize for—and human breeders do.
And… if humans had been explicitly bred for friendliness and corrigibility for a while, it seems to me that they likely would want to do the analogous thing of maximizing-their-donations-to-sperm/egg-banks. After all, we can already see that people who are high on either end of some personality trait such as altruism/selfishness, dominance/submission, openness/conservatism, etc., are likely to view that trait as a virtue (as long as nothing in the environment too overwhelmingly disproves this) and seek to become even more like that.
Altruistic people often want to become even more altruistic, selfish people eliminate their altruistic “weaknesses”, dominant people to become more dominant, submissive people to make it easier for themselves to submit (this has some strong counterforces in our culture where submissiveness is generally considered undesirable, but you can still see it valued in e.g. workplace cultures where workers resent reforms that would give them more autonomy, preferring bosses to “just tell them what to do”), open people to become more open to experience, and so on.
Probably if people high on such traits were offered chances to self-modify to become even moreso—which seems analogous to the sperm/egg bank thing, since it’s the cognitive optimization form of the instinctive thing—quite a few of them would.
I was just thinking about this. The central example that’s often used here is “evolution optimized humans for inclusive genetic fitness, nonetheless humans do not try to actually maximize the amount of their surviving offspring, such as by everyone wanting to donate to sperm/egg banks”.
But evolution does not seem to maximize fitness in that sense, where the fitness of a species would be a distinct thing-in-the-world that could be directly observed and optimized for. Something like “docileness” or “size”, as used in animal breeding, would be a much better analogy, since those things are something that you can directly observe and optimize for—and human breeders do.
And… if humans had been explicitly bred for friendliness and corrigibility for a while, it seems to me that they likely would want to do the analogous thing of maximizing-their-donations-to-sperm/egg-banks. After all, we can already see that people who are high on either end of some personality trait such as altruism/selfishness, dominance/submission, openness/conservatism, etc., are likely to view that trait as a virtue (as long as nothing in the environment too overwhelmingly disproves this) and seek to become even more like that.
Altruistic people often want to become even more altruistic, selfish people eliminate their altruistic “weaknesses”, dominant people to become more dominant, submissive people to make it easier for themselves to submit (this has some strong counterforces in our culture where submissiveness is generally considered undesirable, but you can still see it valued in e.g. workplace cultures where workers resent reforms that would give them more autonomy, preferring bosses to “just tell them what to do”), open people to become more open to experience, and so on.
Probably if people high on such traits were offered chances to self-modify to become even moreso—which seems analogous to the sperm/egg bank thing, since it’s the cognitive optimization form of the instinctive thing—quite a few of them would.
What about selecting for “moderation in all things”? Is that not virtue?
Aristotle invented quantification you heard here first