Joe Carlsmith

Like, well, one important feature of these norms is that they're kind of effective and powerful.

Like liberal societies are, you know, like, you know, secure boundaries, save resources wasted on conflict, right?

And like liberal societies are often more like, you know, they're better to live

live in, they're better to immigrate to, they're more productive, like all sorts of things.

Nice people, they're better to interact with, they're better to like trade with, all sorts of things, right?

And I think it's pretty clear if you look at the, both like why at a political level do we have like various political institutions?

And if you look kind of more deeply into our evolutionary past and like how our moral cognition is structured, it seems like pretty clear that various like kind of forms of cooperation and like kind of game theoretic dynamics and other things went into

kind of shaping what we now, at least in certain contexts, also treat as a kind of intrinsic or terminal value.

So like,

these, some of these values that have kind of instrumental functions in our society are also get kind of reified in our cognition as kind of intrinsic values in themselves.

And I think that's okay.

I don't think that's a debunking.

Like all of your, uh, all your values are kind of like some, something that kind of stuck and got kind of, uh, uh, treated as a terminal, terminally important.

Um, but I think that means that, uh,

You know, sometimes the way, in the context of the series where I'm talking about, like, deep atheism and our sort of relationship, the relationship between what we're pushing for and what, like, nature is pushing for or what sort of pure power we'll push for.

And it's easy to say, like, well, there's, like, paperclips, which is just, like, one way, place you can steer.

And, you know, pleasure is just, like, another place you can steer or something.

And these are...

just sort of arbitrary directions.

Whereas I think like some of our other values are much more structured around like cooperation and things that also are kind of effective and functional and like powerful.