Most civilizations in the past have had “bad values” by our standards. People have been in preference falsification equilibria where they feel like they have to endorse certain values or face social censure. They probably still are falsifying preferences and our civilizational values are probably still bad. E.g. high incidence of people right now saying they’re traumatized. CEV probably tends more towards the values of untraumatized than traumatized humans, even from a somewhat traumatized starting point.
The idea that civilization is “oppressive” and some societies have fewer problems points to value drift that has already happened. The Roman empire was really, really bad and has influenced future societies due to Christianity and so on. Civilizations have become powerful partly through military mobilization. Civilizations can be nice to live in in various ways, but that mostly has to do with greater satisfaction of instrumental values.
Some of the value drift might not be worth undoing, e.g. value drift towards caring more about far-away people than humans naturally would.
I think an underrated possibility is that a lot of humans across human history aren’t falsifying their values or preferences, and they do actually have those values, it’s just that the values were terrible by your value/utility function, but they truly do value what society in general values.
More generally, I don’t buy the thesis that people are falsifying their preferences too much, and think that the claim that their values/wants are bad/oppressive only makes sense in a relative context, and only makes sense relative to someone else’s values.
This can also be said of civilizations.
BTW, this is most likely a reporting artifact due to better diagnostics, and is of no relevance in practice:
high incidence of people right now saying they’re traumatized.
Can you say more about why this would be desirable?
Most civilizations in the past have had “bad values” by our standards. People have been in preference falsification equilibria where they feel like they have to endorse certain values or face social censure. They probably still are falsifying preferences and our civilizational values are probably still bad. E.g. high incidence of people right now saying they’re traumatized. CEV probably tends more towards the values of untraumatized than traumatized humans, even from a somewhat traumatized starting point.
The idea that civilization is “oppressive” and some societies have fewer problems points to value drift that has already happened. The Roman empire was really, really bad and has influenced future societies due to Christianity and so on. Civilizations have become powerful partly through military mobilization. Civilizations can be nice to live in in various ways, but that mostly has to do with greater satisfaction of instrumental values.
Some of the value drift might not be worth undoing, e.g. value drift towards caring more about far-away people than humans naturally would.
I think an underrated possibility is that a lot of humans across human history aren’t falsifying their values or preferences, and they do actually have those values, it’s just that the values were terrible by your value/utility function, but they truly do value what society in general values.
More generally, I don’t buy the thesis that people are falsifying their preferences too much, and think that the claim that their values/wants are bad/oppressive only makes sense in a relative context, and only makes sense relative to someone else’s values.
This can also be said of civilizations.
BTW, this is most likely a reporting artifact due to better diagnostics, and is of no relevance in practice: