More On Evolved Values

Me in 2021: 

With sufficient further evolution, our descendants are likely to directly and abstractly know that they simply value more descendants.

Let me now change my mind somewhat. 

It makes sense for agents to, somewhere inside themselves, know abstractly that they just want more long term evolutionary impact. But if they also have a “press secretary” mainly tasked with managing their self-presentation to the world, it makes less sense for such a press secretary to take this stance. To a first approximation, your conscious mind is such a press secretary for the rest of your mind. 

Instead, the “values” that a press secretary embraces are designed less to guide decisions, and more to make good impressions. Though the more closely others can monitor your decisions, the smaller the deviations between the two one can allow and still avoid accusations of hypocrisy. 

An impression-serving function of values is to show what is sacred to you. After all, three of the seven correlate themes of the sacred are that we value it, we show we value it, and we bind groups via a shared view of its value. So we use our publicly declared values to show which groups we feel bound to. And when we use values for this sacred function, we should expect to see the other four themes of idealizing such sacred things, setting them apart, feeling not thinking them, and feeling them strong in concrete icons. 

More generally, the main practical reason to declare public values that differ from one’s action priorities is to show and support coalition partners. A key subset of our strategies re how we plan to have more long term influence are re which coalitions of allies we intend to use for this purpose, which coalitions we publicly claim to support for this purpose, and which particular coalition coordination strategies we intend to support. Coalitions help each other to promote their long term influence.

For this purpose, it is important that different agents advertise different values, to signal their different intended coalitions. And it is important for such agents to somehow point to how those coalitions are defined, and their intended coordination strategies. Showing what you see as sacred has so far been a robust strategy in this space, but many others seem possible.

Thus the values that we should expect to see with sufficient further evolution seem less far from our current humans values than I had previously realized.