the scope insensitive humans die and their society is extinguished
Ah, your reaction makes more sense given you think this is the proposal. But it’s not the proposal. The proposal is that the scope-insensitive values flourish on Earth, and the scope-sensitive values flourish in the remaining cosmos.
As a toy example, imagine a distant planet with two species of alien: paperclip-maximisers and teacup-protectors. If you offer a lottery to the paperclip-maximisers, they will choose the lottery with the highest expected number of paperclips. If you offer a lottery to the teacup-satisfiers, they will choose the lottery with the highest chance of preserving their holy relic, which is a particular teacup.
The paperclip-maximisers and the teacup-protectors both own property on the planet. They negotiate the following deal: the paperclip-maximisers will colonise the cosmos, but leave the teacup-protectors a small sphere around their home planet (e.g. 100 light-years across). Moreover, the paperclip-maximisers promise not to do anything that risks their teacup, e.g. choosing a lottery that doubles the size of the universe with 60% chance and destroys the universe with 40% chance.
Do you have intuitions that the paperclip-maximisers are exploiting the teacup-protectors in this deal?
Do you think instead that the paperclip-maximisers should fill the universe with half paperclips and half teacups?
I think this scenario is a better analogy than the scenario with the drought. In the drought scenario, there is an object fact which the nearby villagers are ignorant of, and they would act differently if they knew this fact. But I don’t think scope-sensitivity is a fact like “there will be a drought in 10 years”. Rather, scope-sensitivity is a property of a utility function (or a value system, more generally).
Ah, your reaction makes more sense given you think this is the proposal. But it’s not the proposal. The proposal is that the scope-insensitive values flourish on Earth, and the scope-sensitive values flourish in the remaining cosmos.
As a toy example, imagine a distant planet with two species of alien: paperclip-maximisers and teacup-protectors. If you offer a lottery to the paperclip-maximisers, they will choose the lottery with the highest expected number of paperclips. If you offer a lottery to the teacup-satisfiers, they will choose the lottery with the highest chance of preserving their holy relic, which is a particular teacup.
The paperclip-maximisers and the teacup-protectors both own property on the planet. They negotiate the following deal: the paperclip-maximisers will colonise the cosmos, but leave the teacup-protectors a small sphere around their home planet (e.g. 100 light-years across). Moreover, the paperclip-maximisers promise not to do anything that risks their teacup, e.g. choosing a lottery that doubles the size of the universe with 60% chance and destroys the universe with 40% chance.
Do you have intuitions that the paperclip-maximisers are exploiting the teacup-protectors in this deal?
Do you think instead that the paperclip-maximisers should fill the universe with half paperclips and half teacups?
I think this scenario is a better analogy than the scenario with the drought. In the drought scenario, there is an object fact which the nearby villagers are ignorant of, and they would act differently if they knew this fact. But I don’t think scope-sensitivity is a fact like “there will be a drought in 10 years”. Rather, scope-sensitivity is a property of a utility function (or a value system, more generally).